A marketer should be the man who saw the day-after-tomorrow

Marketing has the unique distinction of being the only function in an organisation which need not be encumbered by the present or the immediate future alone. Marketers need to realise that a privilege that their function allows them is to dream beyond the immediate future. We often draw up the personalities of the brands we manage; it would be interesting to draw up the brand personality of a marketer as well. In the increasingly disruptive world that we live in today, the brand personality of a marketer should be akin to Nostradamus - the man who saw tomorrow. In fact, the tagline for a marketer should be the “The man/woman who saw the day-after-tomorrow”.

It is important to deconstruct what this means. It simply means that strategy was always meant to be a marketing charter and those organisations (barring a few large ones who have a dedicated office of strategy) who have increasingly left this to finance and operations are paying the price with their long-term sustainability. It is also for marketing to step up and reclaim this territory. It is well known that every ten years 30-40 companies disappear from the Fortune 500 list, why is that?

One could study the reasons but I would like to believe that somewhere marketers in these organisations either were not strategic enough and as an extension failed to be Nostradamus and thereby failed to see “The day-,after-tomorrow”. Perhaps they tried and the decision makers were not receptive enough.

Examples abound of disruption leading to extinction - Fuji films with the advent of digital cameras, Nokia failing to foresee the handheld being a repository of apps with design as the draw, bookstores and books themselves gasping with online retail and devices like Kindle and so on.

Let’s look at the world currently

• Apple has campaigns (outdoor) showcasing the photo’s that iPhone cameras can take! In fact, the camera is a key determinant for a smartphone purchase. Is this not impacting the sales of entry level digital SLR cameras? Can marketing at Nikon not think of launching Nikon smartphones as a logical extension of their camera quality credentials to grow their market and prevent the likes of Apple to eat into their market?

• We now have shaving clubs, yes shaving clubs! You can simply sign up for time-based subscription packages based on the number of shaves you need and they will deliver blades to your doorstep at no extra cost! Now marketing in Gillette has reacted by launching their own shaving club but they did not see this disruption coming. It may be wise to buy out the most popular shaving club to prevent consumers from moving out of the Gillette fold.

• Socks as a category also is seeing disruption, from the MojaClub. Now if I were a marketer at Byford, I would make a case for buying this out.The point here is that marketers need to develop and hone their visualising skills to disrupt proactively their own successful business models or anticipate likely disruptions and react in advance or play an active role in recommending M&A. All these have a bearing on the existence of the brands, categories and organisations you represent.

To my mind, Zuckerberg of Facebook best embodies what a Nostradamus marketer should be, inventing or quickly seeing potential disruptions and acquiring them against all odds. The acquisition of Kevin Systrom’s Instagram ( USD 1 Billion with $300M in cash), $3Billion acquisition of SnapChat, $19Billion acquisition of WhatsApp and Oculus for $2billion all to my mind have one motivation - any social networking should not happen outside of Facebook. It takes vision and courage to last beyond decades and marketers should take it upon themselves to be the fountainheads of vision and courage.

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